Private cloud: Some enterprises are getting interested in spinning up VPNs into Amazon to host intranet applications on shared hardware.

Roll your own private cloud: Some enterprises have engaged service providers to create their own private cloud environments on dedicated hardware on their own premises.

DevOps: This is the concept of not only version-controlling and release-managing a software package installation but also the installation/configuration of the infrastructure that the software package sits on by the use of automation. The catch phrase for DevOps is "Infrastructure as Code".

In practice this usually means scripts of some sort that deploy Amazon AMIs, elastic load balancers, configure them, and build/deploy the software package. There are many benefits, namely consistent infrastructure configuration across environments, better (often also automated) testing and the ability to frequently and rapidly deploy. Some single-application, massive-scale, online companies deploy new software versions multiple times a day.

How does security fit into this?

In software deployment there are a few key security controls. Segregation of development, test and production environments—approvals for release from development to test and from test into production should be segregated so that one person cannot write and promote code to production.

Infrastructure security controls also need to be deployed for DevOps style automated deployment. The configuration scripts should securely configure the systems to benchmarks. Did you know that the Center for Internet Security are planning to have CIS benchmark configured AMIs in the Amazon Marketplace?

All this DevOps and Cloud stuff is starting to help us Infosec people with the basics so we can focus on the tricky appsec aspects. I encourage you all to investigate Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure and start to enter a new and potentially more secure world!

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No matter how robust your security, or how diligent your employees, network credentials are a free pass for cybercriminals. This is mostly because employees are relied upon for their own password management. And with more than 4.8 billion sets of stolen credentials said to be available online, odds are that at least a few of your employees’ user IDs and passwords are just waiting to be used by unscrupulous outsiders. Are you ready to stop them?

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